In 1842 an obscure professor of agronomy in the
German provincial town of Giessen, published a book in
English which would revolutionise agriculture. Marx
would say that Justus, Baron von Liebig (1803-73) was
�more important than all the economists put together�.
Only one other natural scientist had as great an influence
on Marx, and that was the biologist Charles Darwin.
Liebig's discoveries put soil science on its modern
footing. He analysed plant photosynthesis and found
how plants fix nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air.
The lab he set up pioneered work on artificial fertilisers.
By putting it on a scientific basis, he helped make
possible the capitalist agriculture which complemented
capitalist industry.
But Liebig himself was no great fan of capitalism. He
believed it led to a damaging divorce between man and
nature, and it was from Liebig's work that Marx drew the
conclusion that in the long run capitalist agriculture will
lead to falling yields, desertification and loss of
biodiversity.
Even more than his work as a soil scientist, Liebig's
lasting achievement was to postulate that any complex
system is always limited by a single boundary condition.
Liebig's Law is fundamental to most modern ideas about
carrying capacity and the limits to growth. It states that
the productivity and ultimately the survival of any
complex system dependent on numerous essential inputs
or sinks is limited by that single variable in least supply.
Thus, the lack of any essential soil nutrient limits overall
soil fertility. The shortage of iron constrained
development of the English economy in the 18th century.
Removing such bottlenecks attracts resources on a scale
ultimately dependent only on the limits of the whole
economy and the available capital. But accumulation can
never eliminate bottlenecks entirely. Instead, expanding
economies which constantly transform their technical
basis, will always press against new limits to growth,
struggle to overcome them and sometimes succeed,
sometimes not.
Liebig's Law has proven fundamental to understanding
the cyclical dynamics of capitalist accumulation, but
what the Law points to is not the existence of external
limits to growth, as most environmentalists assume, but
to the limits which occur immanently, as a system's
dynamics evolve.
This is true of any natural ecosystem, from soil itself to
the large scale interactions between species coexisting
and competing within biomes. Liebig's Law points to the
existence of interdependences within holistic systems. It
is not a simply question of one nutrient or mineral in
short supply determining the growth in numbers of all
populations within a system, but rather of the way the
relative availability of components conditions the
complex interactions of the organisms making up an
ecosystem and without any one of which the integrity
of the ecosystem as a whole may be compromised. One
mineral or nutrient is in short supply relative to the
reproduction and evolution of the whole system.
Feedback processes may and often do act to ensure
that equilibrium is maintained by ensuring the continued
existence of a limiting factor. Well-functioning
ecosystems do not normally overstress the species
inhabiting the common space by allowing populations to
bloom to the point of collapse and die-off. Rather, as
Eugene Odum says, the tendency that seems to
characterize natural ecosystems is that of maximizing the
quality of the overall environment for the mutual benefit
of all species within it.
For Marx, too, the limits to capitalist accumulation were
immanent, not external, and derive from its own
operation. This is questioned not only by
environmentalists but some Marxists who have adopted
Green arguments that the 'limits to growth' are external
and are posited by objectively-pre-existing environmental
constraints, for example finite resources, or the limits
potentially imposed by environmental impacts such as
global warming resulting from anthropogenic greenhouse
emissions. The exponents of a Green-Red synthesis
have actually adopted arguments from ecology which are
mistaken in their own, terms, however. In fact it is Marx
who is closer to the underlying thought: capitalism too
can be regarded as a closed, self-sufficient system,
evolved and governed by its own laws. There is no need
to resort to externalities to explain either capitalist crisis
or the limits to capitalist growth.
To reassert the holistic nature of Marxism does more
than underline its affinity with holistic ecology. It is also
to demolish post-modern critiques of Marxism which
deconstruct Marxism (and the emancipatory task) into
particularities which deny hegemony and finally history.
Thus Harry Cleaver has written about hegemony and counter-
hegemony: "Two great mistakes in the Western
revolutionary tradition have been the obsession with
totalization and the idea that system must follow system.
Revolutionaries, despite their rejection of capitalism's
imperial efforts to absorb the world and impose a
universal hegemony, have still thought the future in terms
of unity and counter-hegemony. Many Marxists have
believed that just as a unifying capitalist system followed
feudalism, so must some unifying system called
socialism (or communism) be constructed to replace
capitalism. Many radical environmentalists, while
condemning the destructiveness of capitalism's imposed
unity, think in terms of bio-systems, of a holistic Gaia."
Cleaver is wrong on both counts: Marxism is counter-
hegemonic, and eco-systems are holistic.
Marx was the
first to analyse the totalizing dynamic of capitalist
accumulation, to identify that as its revolutionary
essence, and Marx showed how no piecemeal reforms or
emendations were possible precisely because
capitalism's engulfing, totalising nature either absorbed
reforms, recuperating them to its own [intensified]
accumulation process, or destroyed them, evacuating
their historical meaning. Only the revolutionary
overthrow of the capitalist state and liquidation of the
capitalist mode of production in its entirety could
prevent counter-revolution making a mockery of
opposition; and only cynical hypocrisy and self-seeking,
could allow reformism to masquerade as real opposition.
But Marx never produced [utopian] schemes for 'some
unifying system' as Cleaver suggests, and always
criticsed attempts at second-guessing what lay beyond
capitalism. To make the working class a class for itself,
politically totalising it and concentrating it historically, is
a different mater: withoiut such hegemonic class-
consciousness, there can be no totalising politics
adequate in real practice to destroying capitalism.
Marx showed how industrial capitalism, once it was
launched, had no choice but either collapse or continue
on its growth-path. Competition between individual
capitals forced speed-up, intensified exploitation, and the
introduction of capital-intensive techniques and
machinery. Capitalism's growth-path entailed the growth
of population including an exponentially-expanding
reserve army of labour. The mass production of iron led
directrly to the final break-out from protocapitalism to
the era of dependence on machinery and fossil-fuels,
without which little of the improvements in labour-
productivity of the poast two centuries would have
happened.
The strains in the 18th century English economy
resulted from a prolonged period of development which
produced great gains in agricutlural productivity. The
population doubled to over 8 million; but the bottlenecks
which appeared in energy and raw materials (primarily
but not only iron) threatened to bring the edifice down.
The riots and disorders of the period were magnified on
the continent, where the same strains appeared in
intensified forms, reuslting in food shortages, social
strain and finally the French Revolution.
We have seen that bottlenecks for example in metallurgy
were not the result of natural causes, but of leads and
lags in the process of social accumulation -- of
protocapitalist development. Shortages had social
causes. The accumulation process (which prepared the
way for take-off) was cyclical and exhibited tendencies
to stagnation followed by break-out which always
occurred when sufficient new forces (innovations,
capital, labour supply, resource reserves) had
acumulated in discrete, apparently disconnected ways
throughout the system. When rapid growth began, the
coalescing and mobilising of disparate reserves
reinforced feedback and further magnified growth rates.
Enormous human misery dogged primitive
accumulation each step of the way. But the implied
social contract (the existence and form of which was the
staple topic of Enlightenment conversation) which
emerged as the post-medieval logjams disintegrated, held
then as it does now. The many losses endured by large
swathes of the working population, as the guild and
fedual protections of medieval collectivism disintegrated
pr were thrust aside, were tolerated as long as the
promise of improved living standards was honoured or
anyway, not indefinitely deferred. The mix of coercion
and consent was decisive in guaranteeing social
equilibirium.
Coercion, terror and social conscription
were never enough by themselves to preserve order, and
absolutism everywhere debouched in insurrection or war.
Throughout the British Isles, the horrors of deruralisation
were mitigated by the possibilities of emigration to the
cities or the colonies, where even idnentured servitude
was compoensated by the existence of open frontiers
and empty lands awaiting settlement.
As the rate of growth accelerated, turbulence and
immiseration prompted cultural responses which
included widespeard fear, insecurity, melacnholy and a
sense of loss which was soon associated with the
celebration of the sublime, with nostalgia for the
vanished past or order and stability, and with the
concomitant fixation of Nature by the Romantics as a
dissociated, extra-social -- and distinctly threatened --
category of being. Wordsworth:
Meanwhile at social Industry's command,
How quick, how vast an increase. From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly rpoduced
Here a huge town, continuouis and compact,
Hiding the face of the earth for leagues - and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,
Abodes of men irregualrly massed
Like trees in forests, - spread through spacious tracts,
O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires hangs permanent...
Growth was both ill and panacea. And this was true not
only culturally, but in a deeper historical sense.
Wordsworth's use of the word 'Industry' already in 1814
reflected the cultural, etymological displacement
documented by Raymond Williams, from an adjective
describing human activity to a noun labelling a
constellation of social practices: the economy as a realm
of production (also words whose meanings altered at
this time).
Within fifty years Marx began to rethink this
constellation of activities and relations as a 'mode' of
production. Accumulation, of the factors of production:
land (raw materials, technologies, innovations), labour
(the proletariat, a mass of undiferentiated labour-powers)
and capital, money as a store of value, value as a
representation of the social potentialities available for
mobilisation (�Capital is another word for civilisation,�
Marx would say. ). Thus capital was both a factor of
production, and the representational form, hypothesized,
idealised, of the real material factors, land and labour:
capital was a social metaphysic, or a djinn or even a
vampire.
When bottlenecks appeared, they were themselves the
results of previous accumulation, and they threatened
accumulation's continuation. Capital could be destroyed, land fall
into desolation, labour could starve, reduced to beggary.
Therefore accumulation was a good in itself, above all
others. Only if the process was allowed to continue
unfettered, could the concentration of reserves occur
which was the sole guarantee of the mode of production
as a whole breaking-out from the impasse of a cyclical
downturn and relaunching accumulation on a still higher,
more intensive -- more beneficent! plain.
The entire history of protocapitalist accumulation
seemed to confirm this.
Mark Jones
